Unplugged U.

Share

Unplugged U.

Josh McHugh joins the wireless revolution at Dartmouth, where today's campus life is the prototype of tomorrow's network society.

DARTMOUTH College is the definition of old school. Founded in 1769, it sits in the center of Hanover, New Hampshire, a hamlet two and a half hours northwest of Boston in the Upper Connecticut River Valley. On the east side of the seven-acre town green stands Dartmouth Hall, a three-story colonial-style building; commissioned in 1784, it has twice been destroyed by fire and rebuilt. At 6 pm every day, bells in the tower of Baker Library, the imposing white edifice at the north end of the green, chime out "Alma Mater," Dartmouth's school song. Each homecoming night since 1920, members of the freshman class have built a towering bonfire at the center of the green, running a lap around the pyre for every year of their graduating class (the class of 1999 did 99 laps; not to be outdone, the class of 2000 did 100). And while the administrators of most other Ivy League colleges have long since managed to relegate fraternities and sororities to the margins of campus life, Dartmouth's two dozen Greek houses — one of which, Alpha Delta, was the inspiration for Animal House — are still very much the arbiters of the school's party calendar.

Amid all this time-honored heritage, Kimo Johnson approaches a wood and iron bench beneath the bell tower and sits down. Johnson, who recently earned a master's in electro-acoustic music and is pursuing a PhD in computer science, pulls an iBook from his backpack and opens it on his lap. He waits for the final chimes of "Alma Mater," then starts tapping some keys. Three hundred feet above him, the Baker Library bells change their tune. It's the theme from Star Wars.

Johnson happens to be ringing the bells from this bench, but he could be pretty much anywhere on campus. A look into the drop ceilings, projection rooms, and maintenance closets of Dartmouth's 161 buildings reveals a significant new architectural wrinkle: a campuswide wireless network. More than 500 Wi-Fi antennas, most about the size and shape of a fraternity paddle, cover roughly 200 acres — more or less the sound range of the library tower's bells on a breezy day. Silently flinging and absorbing millions of airborne bits of data every second, they are what makes Johnson's open-air performance possible. The strangest thing about the scene may be that fellow students don't even find it strange. It's commonplace. Johnson does this kind of thing all the time, and even takes email requests.

Remote bell-tower hacking is just one of the ways the wireless network is changing life at Dartmouth. The network is subtly but profoundly altering teaching techniques, social interaction, study habits, and personal security. In spite of its remoteness, the college has long been one of the most wired places on earth, fashioning its campus into the prototype of the fully wireless, always-connected community: a microcosm that provides a peek at what our residential neighborhoods and office spaces may look like in a few years.

And Dartmouth isn't alone. From Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to UC San Diego, American University, UT Dallas, and the University of Minnesota, dozens of schools are deploying wireless networks and turning students loose. As corporations move tentatively toward going airborne and consumer wireless service startups wink in and out of existence, students at many colleges are eagerly embracing life untethered, and creating an environment ripe for explosive innovation.

For all the time, effort, and money sunk into commercial computing endeavors over the past decade, many of the biggest infotech breakthroughs have occurred away from the bustle of the marketplace, in the sheltering groves of academe. Napster, the Web browser, the search engine, and, arguably, the Internet itself all began not as VC-funded startups but as the brainchildren of students and researchers unburdened by concerns about return on investment. Shawn Fanning, bored with the introductory Unix classes at Northeastern University, taught himself to program for Windows machines in order to help a roommate satisfy his jones for MP3s. David Filo and Jerry Yang developed Yahoo! while students at Stanford. Same for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, cofounders of Google. The young pioneers messing around inside Dartmouth's wireless biosphere are definitely worth watching.

Take Ben Kasdon, a Dartmouth exchange student with spiky, bleached-blond hair. Kasdon recently applied for a patent on a personal-security device that uses the network's base stations to pinpoint the location of campus emergencies. About the size of a cigarette lighter, the gadget attaches to a key chain and, when its panic button is squeezed, links up with nearby wireless access points to triangulate and transmit its position.

When I meet up with Kasdon, who's working on a double degree at Dartmouth and Skidmore, he's relaxing in the Collis student center, just in from traversing the campus with an open laptop to look for holes in the network's coverage. Asked to name the biggest difference between the two schools, he gives an answer that should stop phone company executives — and anyone else who's betting on the cellular carriers' version of the future — in their tracks: "Nobody here knows anyone's phone number."

Dartmouth's campus email system went live in 1988. This was a few years before the era brought to us by the prefix e-, so the system's original name, BlitzMail, stuck. Students quickly truncated it to "blitz," a term that, 13 years later, still permeates the lexicon. Dartmouth students say it constantly — as a noun ("I just read your blitz"), a verb ("Just blitz me when you're ready"), and an adjective ("A paper note or a blitz note?").

In the years since the school first went wireless, many graduates have gone on to careers in data communications. In fact, Dartmouth's new wireless network owes its existence to alumni. In 1999, computer science professor David Kotz decided to explore the idea of Wi-Fi on campus. "I knew that if we installed the network and let these creative students at it, they'd figure out how to use it in ways we never dreamed of," Kotz says. He got in touch with a former student, Bill Rossi, who also happens to be the GM of Cisco's wireless networking division.

Rossi rounded up a half-dozen other Dartmouth alums at Cisco, and in the fall of 2000, the group donated 80 Cisco Aironet 350 wireless access points (the paddles) along with the rest of the hardware needed to get it all up and running. By the end of spring term, the college had bought another 460 access point antennas, and the campus was fully swathed in connectivity — all for a relatively minor outlay of about $750,000.

The switch from a completely wire-bound network to the Wi-Fi system was anything but gradual. There was no waiting around for the marketplace's false starts while companies figured out whether and how much consumers would pay for service; no delays while testers probed for every possible security hole and software bug. The basic character of university life emphasizes sharing knowledge over keeping secrets. Just as boozy college freshmen can be counted on to share their darkest secrets with near strangers the first week of fall semester, university computing environments will — and should — allow for creative experimentation first and worry about security later. Setting up a new system for students is more akin to assembling a jungle gym than building a suspension bridge. Around the country, university IT departments are getting the green light on wireless networks, and in a fraction of the time and cost it would take to hardwire the same area, they're going live.

Cisco is making it even easier. In recent years, hundreds of startups have come to grief by giving stuff away. Cisco is meeting universities halfway. The company sells its gear to colleges at 30 percent below retail, then writes off the difference. Cisco-subsidized, campuswide 802.11 networks blinked into action last year at the University of Akron, the University of Missouri, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Wisconsin, and Western Michigan University.

The payoff for providing the discounts is obvious to Cisco. Dartmouth and several other Cisco-powered universities have agreed to give the company an early look at reports on network performance and usage patterns. That — in addition to a few hundred thousand new Wi-Fi-addicted customers graduating every spring — comes out to a pretty good deal for the company. "We're conducting joint research with the ideal customer," Rossi says. "They're developing new tools."

The quiz-show app takes a few minutes to reboot. It's like someone kicked out the stereo plug in the middle of a good party.

Cisco is betting that the next great homegrown application that catches fire will capitalize on the quickly proliferating Wi-Fi infrastructure, pushing cellular further off to the margins.

Microcosm of the future or not, ultraconnected college kids are, of course, still college kids. Being attached to the network at all times may drive product innovation, but it also provides endless opportunity for kibitzing and mischief. What looming exam could hope to compete with the following hormone-fueled, technology-enabled midterm BlitzMail exchange, forwarded by Dartmouth senior Zachary Berke?

Male student: i'm so fucking exhausted from all this studying ... aaaaaah.

Arresting stuff. But just as the wireless network can turn a laptop into a flirting tool, it can also transform an ordinary class into a game show. Keeping students engaged with the course material is the lifework of G. Christian Jernstedt, a graying Dartmouth psychology professor of 30 years currently teaching two courses on the psychology of learning.

A nightmare shared by teachers everywhere consists of some variation on the Ferris Bueller Moment: The teacher asks a question; dead silence ensues. "Anyone?" the teacher pleads. "Anyone?" The reason it happens is simple: When you're not sure of the answer, the embarrassment of getting it wrong in front of your professor and peers far outweighs the potential reward of getting it right.

Jernstedt is using Dartmouth's wireless network to Bueller-proof his classroom. The assignment for today's class was to watch Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1969 film Z and apply a psychoanalytical framework to its plot and characters. I'm sitting among 75 students, each armed with a Handspring Visor equipped with a Xircom 802.11 card (donated by Handspring in exchange for the chance to observe how the gear is used). Each participant is represented by a red dot at the bottom of a projection screen at the front of the room.

Jernstedt uses a projector to show scenes from the movie, followed by a multiple-choice question. An onscreen clock counts down 60 seconds; meanwhile, pockets of debate form among the students. When a student chooses an answer and checks the corresponding box on the Visor, his red dot turns green. (The wireless access point handling most of the traffic is located in the projection booth in the back of the room.) Once the votes are in, the results pop up onscreen by percentage. Jernstedt asks each group why they chose their answer. Realizing that they aren't alone in their thinking — even if they gave the least popular answer — dozens of students raise their hands, jockeying to catch his eye.

As if proof that Jernstedt hasn't seeded the class with a cadre of extra-nerdy ringers to impress a visiting journalist, the PC that's running the questionnaire crashes a half hour into the class. It takes a few minutes to reboot. Rather than wait, Jernstedt shows another scene. He asks the class what's happening in the scene. Silence. A Bueller Moment. Jernstedt draws out a few tentative hands, but the mood suddenly feels as though someone has turned on all the lights and kicked out the stereo plug in the middle of a good party. After a few more uninspired rounds of old-fashioned psych class, the quiz-show app is running again, styluses are tapping out answers, and a small forest of hands rises for the analysis. "I work hard at engagement, so this is difficult for me to say," Jernstedt admits after class. "But this system makes them want to give the answer. As a teacher, that is really hard to produce."

It's too soon to say exactly which Wi-Fi computing phenomena will emerge from Dartmouth and the other schools to achieve critical mass. But if recent history is any indication, the students are a great place to start looking.

Doug Jackson, who oversees the UT Dallas network, recently worked out an agreement with a student who was running his own free wireless ISP from a non-university broadband connection. When the student's traffic began interfering with other students' access, Jackson tweaked a few settings and let the student carry on. Jackson also had to install an additional security system to keep students from wirelessly infiltrating administrative servers to improve their grades. At UC San Diego, a 15-year-old student created a location system similar to the one developed by Dartmouth's Ben Kasdon. The program works like a buddy list, showing students where their selected friends' computers are on campus at any given moment. The software runs on Jornadas, which HP is giving to students; some users are up in arms, worried that their peers — friends and strangers alike — will use the system to shadow their movements around campus.

In the year since the Dartmouth wireless system went live, several students have developed tracking projects — little surprise, since with so many laptops moving around, there's a minor epidemic of computer theft. Our man Zach Berke won Dartmouth's most recent Kemeny prize, an annual award for computing innovation, for his program that uses Wi-Fi base stations to surreptitiously find any laptop on campus. One of Professor Kotz's students has written some code that calculates how far away a networked PDA user is from her next appointment and adjusts the PDA's reminder alarm schedule accordingly.

Dartmouth's Wi-Fi setup is also having a sociological effect. An analysis of wireless data traffic during the fall semester of last year shows how the new network is shaping campus behavior patterns. Students log on in short bursts, for a median stretch of 16 minutes at a time — probably checking blitzes. They tend to plant themselves in a few favorite spots — their dorm's TV room, the Collis student center, a shaded bench on the green — to use their computers, and they rarely connect beyond those places.

The sisters of Epsilon Kappa Theta are definitely up to something. The wireless cards in the sorority house's computers each move an average of 222 Mbytes of data per day — only one other spot on campus, an administrative building, moves more than 150 Mbytes a day per card. An MP3 server, perhaps? Maybe they're watching streamed video on a big-screen TV — or using high-bandwidth Internet radio to supply the music for all-night parties. They could be trying to corner the market on Diesel jeans via sorority eshopping excursions, or running a molecular modeling program for a pharmaceutical company. We may never know for sure. Since the college has a strict policy against monitoring student computer use unless investigating complaints, university officials couldn't tell me what's going on. The sisters of EKT did not respond to my prying emails. So for now, their secret remains safe.

Others are not so reticent. Brad Noblet, director of Dartmouth computing services, is deploying an XML-based voice-over-IP system. "Up here, cell phones suck," says Noblet. "So three students and I are working on a voice version of BlitzMail for PDAs and iPAQs that uses live two-way voice-over-IP chat."

To qualify as truly significant additions to the human experience, innovations in consumer technology must become part of the background of everyday life — the tool itself is an afterthought. Once a technology is refined enough, we don't have to think about how to use it or whether it will work this time, only about what we want to accomplish with it. We pick up the remote control with the intent of watching the news, not operating the TV; we think in terms of going from point A to point B, not in terms of controlling an automobile. At Dartmouth, at least, the Wi-Fi network is already showing signs of becoming a truly significant afterthought. Getting unhooked, it turns out, is making it easier than ever to hook up.

It's 2:30 on a Sunday morning, and Ben Kasdon is in his dorm room in Richardson Hall, getting ready to crash. He's just returned from the kegger at Psi Upsilon, and his ears are still faintly ringing. Ben shucks his snowboarding jacket, kicks off his Etnies, and leans over the laptop on his desk to see if any interesting blitzes came in while he was out.

The sisters of Epsilon Kappa Theta are definitely up to something, moving an average of 1.3 Gbytes a day.

There's a knock on the door. Before Ben can get up, the door opens enough for a head to pop in and look around. It's his friend Rob.

"Ben. Dude. I think Kate might have blitzed me. Can I check?"

Ben logs out of his BlitzMail account and moves out of the way.

Rob logs on. "Yes, dude, yes. There she is."

Rob types his response: Cool. Are you heading back to your room now? As he sends the blitz, Rob looks back at Ben and begins to raise his eyebrows. Rob's 5,000-bit booty call shoots from Ben's laptop into the attached Ethernet cable and, at two-thirds the speed of light, on to the network hub in the first-floor maintenance closet. Then things speed up.

The hub fires the bits, in the form of light pulses, along a strand of fiber-optic cable. By the time Rob's eyebrows arch fully, his blitz has traveled half a block north to the basement of Wilder Hall; another half block north to a router in Fairchild; a block west to College Street and five blocks south, under the east side of the town green, to the switching room under the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts; three blocks northwest underneath the green to McNutt; four blocks north to Rockefeller Hall; and across the street to the BlitzMail server in Berry Library. When Kate checks her blitzes, the data crosses the street again and zips one block north to Brown Hall.

The bits hop off the fiber into a network hub in the basement of Brown, then climb an Ethernet cable to an antenna. The antenna broadcasts Rob's message, in the form of radio waves, into the chilly late-night air between a cluster of dormitories known as the Choates. In one of those dorms, the network card in Kate's laptop plucks the bits out of the air.

We don't know which dorm Kate's in because Rob, chivalrous to a fault, won't tell. The beauty of it is that for our purposes — and, more important, for his — it doesn't matter exactly where she is, only that she is somewhere, anywhere, inside the network's coverage area.

Kate reads the message, types a response, and sends it.

Rob's inbox flashes. He opens the blitz. Kate is heading back to her room. Rob logs off and scrambles for the door.

10:20 pm: Plug into data port in the base of the room's desk lamp. Try to dial up ISP's local number; no dial tone. Dig cord out of hotel phone. Score 22K connection; wait for two days' worth of Web-based email.

10:30 pm: Hungry. Too late for room service. Use hotel phone to order a pizza from Everything but Anchovies ("EBA's"), Dartmouth late-night eatery.

11:15 pm: Eat. Answer email.

11:45 pm: Sleep.

Day 2

9:30 am: Get set up with access to Dartmouth wireless network. The process: Type in the name of the subnet. No password necessary.

12:30 pm: Lunch with Dartmouth IT director Brad Noblet at Zins, in the Hanover Inn (part of the network's coverage!). Discuss benefits of academic IT career vs. startups. Brad asks if I mind if he checks his email. (Not at all.) I break out my own laptop. Our computers teeter on our small table next to cheeseburger remains. We answer email for a while without talking. Seems odd at first. Feeling passes.

Day 2

2:00 pm: Tour campus network access points, look at base station antennas tucked away in broom closets and belfries. Students sitting everywhere, laptops open. For the first time ever on a reporting trip, am not preoccupied with sneaking back to hotel room to retrieve email.

Day 2

8:00 pm: Camp out in hotel room. Simultaneously watch lawyer drama Philly on TV, type up notes, and download MP3s over the Hanover Inn wireless subnet at 10 times the speed of crummy dialup connection at home.

12:30 am: Letterman ends. Stomachache. Have downloaded about three dozen MP3s. Mozzarella sticks untouched. Carry laptop from couch to bed. Check email one more time. No new mail. Put computer on bedside table. Just in case.

Day 3

9:00 am: It's beginning to seem silly to lug a 6-pound computer around campus, unpack it, and find a place to sit down each time I use it. For the first time, the iPAQ, ill-favored offspring of PC and PDA, almost makes sense.